How To Check and Replace a Bad Tie Rod ~ Clunk While Turning

what's going on everybody it's charles in this video we are going to be checking and replacing some tie rods on this toyota highlander even though there's countless different designs of a power steering setup they all have the same purpose and function pretty much the same this is the body of a power steering rack out of a 98 gti attached to the power steering rack body is going to be the inner tie rods you'll notice in this case these are threaded for our adjustment which we'll talk about in a second then we also have the outer tie rod this is the piece that's attached to the wheel hub now the whole point of all of this is to form a connection between the driver or the steering wheel and the wheels outside the car our power steering system turns a circular motion rotating the wheel back and forth to a linear motion of the wheels turning left or right now i've taken apart this power steering body to show you what it looks like inside this piece right here is actually what i'll attach to the steering column and then the steering wheel attaches to that this piece that attaches to the steering column and then the steering wheel drives this shaft right here so as i turn the steering wheel one way it turns the wheels this would be left if i rotate the steering wheel the other way it rotates it right and hey big thanks to advanced auto parts for partnering with us on this video this toyota might look familiar because it's the one we just replaced the rear struts on when we were doing that diagnosis we found that the front needed a little attention as well attached to the end of that power steering rack body is going to be our inner tie rod and our outer tie rod and typically our inner tie rod is covered with a boot to make sure that dirt and debris don't get in the end joint now i mentioned this was threaded for an adjustment our tie rods are actually the primary adjustment on the front of our suspension called toe as we rotate the tie rod in or out it changes how much the front of our wheel points outward toe out or inward toe in now if you're planning on replacing the inner or the outer tie rods or really several other suspension components especially in the front you need to make sure that you're going to plan to get the car aligned after you're done if you just throw these parts on and don't do any measurements before putting it together or don't take it to get aligned you're probably going to do some pretty quick damage to those front tires so if this is a diy thing for you make sure you plan for an alignment when you're done even though there's almost an infinite number of ways different car parts can fail tie rods are pretty basic typically the joint will wear out and that will cause play in the joint of course if you hit something and bend the tie rod well that's a problem too if we think we might have a tie rod issue the very first thing we want to do is get the car up in the air make sure you're using jack stands wheel chocks and lifting the car properly we want to make sure the steering wheel is not locked so we can move the wheel all the way lock left and all the way lock right so the easiest way to check for either an inner or an outer tie rod issue is to get that front end off the ground and move your wheel side to side with your hands at nine o'clock and at three o'clock and as you rock the wheel back and forth a lot of times when they're bad you'll feel that in the wheel now unfortunately this doesn't tell you whether you have an inner or an outer tie rod issue this just tells you that you have an issue with one or the other this is also something that if you have the car up off the ground for any reason say basic maintenance go ahead and give them a quick check you might be able to find an issue there before it's a severe problem i also when i'm doing that always check the 12 o'clock and six o'clock back and forth wiggle you'll almost never feel a loose tie rod this way but you're right here it's worth checking and it might show you that you have a bad ball joint to tell whether it's the inner tie rod or the outer tie rod the best thing you can do is get underneath the car have someone else move the wheel back and forth with their hands at three o'clock and nine o'clock oftentimes you can see the joint either moving or not moving if you can't see either one moving take your hand and place it on either the boot for the inner joint or right on the outer joint and most of the time you'll feel where the issue is it's also a good opportunity to make sure that the jam nut that locks the adjustment in place isn't loose also while you're inspecting your tie rods it's a good idea to check the rest of your suspension you might find out that you have something like this worn out control arm bushing or another issue that might be easily addressed at the same time so here we are on the car this is our boot that covers the inner tie rod our inner tie rod with the threaded portion the jam nut which locks our adjustment for front toe this is the outer tie rod we have our kind of end joint here and then our joint for the inner tie rod is underneath this boot what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to remove this whole section because that's what we're going to replace while it's a good idea to replace this together as one piece if you only had an issue with the outer tie rod you probably get away with just replacing the outer tie rod when it comes to the tools required to do this job oftentimes you can do them with really simple basic hand tools however there's a couple specialty type tools that make doing this job a bit easier these two here are going to be to remove the inner tie rod this big green one here has these different assorted tools that go inside and what they do is they hook right on the inner tie rod and allow you to loosen and tighten it this black one here basically does the same thing except you have to tighten a little allen sometimes these work sometimes they don't it really all depends on the size of the inner tie rod if you can gain access to it usually you can get a pair of big pliers on it and tighten it and loosen it that way our bellows boots are going to have some kind of clamp on it either a spring clamp or maybe a crimp clamp like this one even a worm clamp as possible for the outer tie rod you may need something like this tie rod and cup to break the tie rod loose from the inner tie rod or something like this little ball joint press to pop it free from the housing this is one of those tools that i actually wish i would have bought like well early in my career because it's awesome and it saves a lot of trouble and you don't have to worry about damaging the knuckle trying to hit it with a hammer okay we're gonna be working on the right side of the car but the left and the right side for these are usually pretty much the same i also have the wheel turned all the way to the left that exposes more of both the inner and the outer tie rod not necessary but it does make it a little easier to work on it having more of it exposed first thing we're going to do before we loosen anything i want to make a mark right here where the jam nut is on the threads this is going to allow me to get the tie rod and the jam nut pretty close to where it is right now this doesn't always get it exactly in fact it rarely gets it exactly but it should get us close enough that we can drive the car to the alignment shop without ruining our tires so we'll take our paint marker we're just gonna put a little mark right on the threads and the jam nut next what we're going to do is we're going to break our jam nut loose and our outer tie rod loose this is important to do before you start taking the tie rod off of the knuckle that way this isn't flopping around while you're trying to break it loose we also want to be careful not to loosen anything too terribly much that way we can count how many turns it takes to take off the outer tie rod so we can put it back in in roughly the same spot so when i loosen the jam nut it didn't actually loosen the jam nut it loosened the tie rod from inside the outer tie rod i still want that jam nut loose so i'm going to hold the inner tie rod right here and i'm going to loosen that jam nut just a little bit that way it'll be easy coming back off now we can actually rotate this kind of around where it was roughly we should have no problem getting this off when this bolt is loose next we're going to take off our outer tie rod from our steering knuckle or our wheel hub this one has a cotter pin that we need to get rid of so you can either bend it or cut it whatever you prefer get that out of the way then we're going to loosen this nut right here now this one loosened pretty easy if you get into a place where you're trying to loosen this nut but the whole tie rod is spinning what you can do is take either a pair of pliers or in this case this tie rod has a spot for a wrench and kind of pull pressure down that'll hold our little ball joint in here steady while you loosen this also quick blips with an impact gun usually work better than just like a full send out or trying to use a wrench luckily for us this one came out pretty easy now our our tie rod end is still in our steering knuckle there's a couple of ways to get it out some i love some i don't the one i don't love is taking a hammer and wrapping on the bottom bolt here i don't like that because what can happen is it can mushroom this and actually make it really hard to get out to the point where you have to cut it you can try hitting it like up here that may or may not work it really all depends i like this better than this you can also hit it right here where the ball joint goes into the knuckle i don't love that either because i've seen these really really damaged from doing that and it's a huge no-no if this piece right here is aluminum you'll completely destroy it my favorite way is this guy right here it slips on just like that and then as we tighten this bolt up it will push or press the ball joint out this is also super good if you plan on reusing this say you're replacing the knuckle or whatever that generally doesn't damage it next we're going to take our outer tie rod off and what i like to do is i like to count how many turns it takes to remove the outer tie rod now it's not always going to translate exactly but it should get you pretty close 16. so that one took 16 turns to come all the way off so we're going to run it in roughly 16 turns on our new end also notice look at how floppy this this end is we're also going to take off our jam nut i had trouble getting this one off by hand we'll just use some tools you can also use like an impact and just whizz it right off as long as you're holding that inner tie rod it shouldn't be a problem now there's no need to count the jam nut because we have our mark before we removed it where it's marked okay next we're gonna get our boot out of the way this one has a spring clamp on the outside and a crimp clamp on the inside the spring clamp comes off no problem the crimp clamp at the back is a little bit trickier now sometimes it's something as simple as a zip tie sometimes it's a worm drive clamp this can kind of be all different things really the only thing that clamp is there for is so the boot doesn't come off when you turn the wheel so it doesn't even really need to be that tight for these crimp clamps i like to take a screwdriver and just kind of break the clamp or pop it open as best i can it doesn't have to be all the way open just enough to get the boot out and here we have expose now our inner tie rod and you can see our our little ball and cup here just how loose the ball is also while you have that boot off this is a great opportunity to make sure that you don't have any leaking seals in the power steering rack if you take that boot off and a whole bunch of fluid comes dumping out of there you have an internal seal leaking in the power steering rack so you either need to get the rack rebuilt or replaced so next we need to get our inner tie rod off this is where our inner tie rod tool is going to come into play this is the little adapter that fits this inner tie rod the best so we're going to set that right on the grooved part of the tie rod then what we're going to do is we're going to take our sleeve and we're going to go right over the inner tie rod and lock it the tool on then we can loosen it and run that inner tie rod all the way out having that tool is awesome and on most inner tie rods it works really well however sometimes the tool none of the adapters fit or you can't get in there or there's some other reason why you can't use that tool enter the giant pliers this is not my favorite way but if you have to do it this way this is better than having this inner joint here completely destroyed grab your inner tie rod and then you're just gonna loosen it usually once you crack it loose you can spin it right off if you have to do it that way going back on same kind of thing now we have our dangly bad inner tie rod okay so here's our old tie rod you can see the ball and then the cup that holds the ball this is what allows our steering rack to move in and out side to side up and down to change angles as we turn and as our suspension geometry changes whether we're going over a bump or something like that but this is super loose inside another reason why it's so floppy like this now our new one is actually pretty tight you can see it's packed full of grease right here i actually probably won't even be able to adjust it because usually you have to have it threaded for those first couple of movements and it doesn't have any floppity it just moves like that so that's more what we're looking for as compared to this guy right here and now it is time to install our new inner tie rod now this one has what looks like a locking washer that goes with it so you'll see the two tabs there are supposed to actually go towards the steering rack because they kind of lock in there we'll slide that on we'll start our inner tie rod and then as it gets snug we'll line that washer up where it needs to go and snug it down all right so once we have it snug let's go ahead and get our installation tool back on slide our fitting on slide our big green tube on here lock it in and tighten it down now this one with that locking washer deal we want to kind of fold it over a little bit towards our inner tie rod to make sure that our tie rod doesn't come loose it's time to put our boot on you'll notice that i have put the clamp on the boot before i put the boot on the car this is a pretty good habit to get into to make sure that you don't have to feed the clamp over the boot or anything like that i'm also replacing it with a worm clamp versus a crimp clamp because this is the clamp that i have that fits this is fine on a steering rack you definitely wouldn't want to put one of these on say an axle or something that rotates but for this application totally cool also you'll notice on our inner tie rod there's this groove right here this is where the outer part of the boot stops so what i'll do is i'll put this boot on till the outer part stops but i'm not going to worry about the inner part just yet going back together with this stuff the order is pretty important otherwise you get to take it apart and do it a second time we'll put our outer spring clamp on now when we go back together with our new jam nut new outer tie rod i'm going to count the threads from the first thread to where our green paint mark is we'll then count the other inner tie rod and put our jam nut in roughly the same spot so this is 16 threads to this mark right here we'll put our jam nut on then we'll run our outer tie rod on next so we're going to count our 16 threads to where our jam nut was and then what we'll do is we'll mark it so that we know where we need to stop with our jam nut then we'll go ahead and spin our jam nut on to the place where our green mark is before you put your outer tire rod on make sure you have your jam nut your clamp your boot your inner clamp all on because at this point it's not too terribly challenging to take it back off and put the thing you forgot on but after we put our outer tie rod it's a little bit more challenging so here's our outer tie rod now something kind of very uneuropean-like on this toyota is a spot for a service fitting or grease fitting so we need to make sure we put that on it is pre-greased but this gives us the opportunity to service it down the road so we'll get that started we'll snug this guy down now we can take our outer tie rod start it and we're gonna turn it in 16 turns all right now what we need to do is we need to get our tie rod end right the ball joint piece into our knuckle you may want to take and scrape this off to make sure there's not a bunch of grime and dirt on there also something to be aware of sometimes there's a sleeve that goes in here that can come off with the outer tie rod you want to make sure there's any kind of sleeve or adapter or spacer or whatever that it goes back on otherwise this will never tighten down next up we'll put our new nut on run that in go ahead and snug it down and we will finish up with our new cotter pin it goes right through and we'll do it just like toyota did it we'll leave one out and we'll bend one down once you got everything on and snug down go ahead and move the wheel to either straight or just to the side that you're working on this is going to make getting that inner boot on much easier now what that did was that compressed our boot a little bit and it's going to make getting it on the steering rack quite a bit easier so just feed that onto the rack and then whatever kind of clamp you put on go ahead and tighten it down i actually do like worm clamps for this application because it's pretty easy to put on but i've even seen some cars come with like a little metal tie or a zip tie or something like that you also want to make sure that if you are using a different clamp that it's not going to hit anything like the sway bar or axle or anything like that so we got our wheel back on now it's time to check our work and make sure that our play is gone we're gonna move the wheel back and forth at nine o'clock and three o'clock and we have no play i mean clearly that was a clear case of that inner tie rod being completely smoked uh which i like when that kind of stuff happens so we're all good here we need to get our wheels torqued and then we got to take this car and go get it aligned all right so it's time to get our alignment we're actually at the dealership that i used to work for because they're awesome and they let us film here process is pretty simple for the alignment you put on the sensors take a few measurements and then adjust anything that needs to be adjusted when you replace tie rods the adjustment that's most likely to be out is going to be the front toe since i marked it and counted how many turns out those outer tie rods were we just had to do a little tweak and tighten down the jam nuts and we're good to go all right so we're all wrapped up as always i'll put links to everything we use down in the description with that i'm out have an awesome day and i'll talk to you next time

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 919,586

Keywords: toyota, tie rod, noise while driving, clunk while driving, noise while turning, bad tie rod, bad tie rod end, bad inner tie rod, how to replace a tie rod, how to check a tie rod, how to check an inner tie rod

Id: 0SsV_pbEM7A

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021